


OneShot and Overlapping Realities

by TheDandyCrickette



Category: Oneshot - Fandom
Genre: Meta, Minor Spoilers, Overlapping Realities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 13:50:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17448206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDandyCrickette/pseuds/TheDandyCrickette





	OneShot and Overlapping Realities

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how we perceive and create realities. I recently had the pleasure of playing the short indie game OneShot and it’s given me a lot of food for thought. OneShot is one of those new style of computer game that breaks the confines of the game’s window and gets your whole computer involved in a way that drastically expands the scope of the story being told. It reads your user information to refer to you by name and forces you into the game files to solve in-game puzzles.

The premise of OneShot is that you are playing as yourself, the owner of the computer on which you play the game. The avatar that you control, Niko, is treated as a separate person (not character, person) entirely and the game itself is yet another independent individual unbound by the narrative of the game, referred to as the Entity or the World Machine. To solidify the divide between player and avatar, OneShot sticks to a strict rule of communication. The World Machine always speaks directly to the player and only refers to Niko in the third person. While much of the communication with the World Machine comes from within the game where Niko can also see the message, the World Machine will also frequently bypass the game window that Niko is privy to and communicate with the player directly via pop-up alerts that appear over the game window. Likewise, the NPCs within the world of the game will only speak to Niko and only refer to the player in the third person. NPCs in the game believe the player to be the god of their world and believe Niko to be a divine savior.

As the savior and in a literal sense the avatar of god, Niko bridges the parallel relationships between player-and-World-Machine and Niko-and-game-world by being able to talk directly to the player in a way that further establishes the idea that the player and Niko are completely separate entities. While the player generally can not respond to the World Machine when it addresses them, they can have brief conversations with Niko that allow the player and Niko to get to know each other and establishes a relationship between them.

In using these mechanics, OneShot asks the player to participate in its story with a willful suspension of disbelief so that it can deliver an experience that extends beyond the normal bounds of a video game. If the player is willing to buy into OneShot’s premise, they can become personally embroiled in the dramatic unfolding of the story and have a powerful relationship with both Niko and the World Machine. OneShot backs up its request for the player’s suspended disbelief with the concept of “tamed” robots. The idea of tamed robots appears throughout the world of OneShot with Niko interacting with both tamed and untamed robots. Tamed robots are marked by speech patterns that resemble those of people and the ability to act outside of the bare bones of their programming. They are shown to be able to solve problems, experience emotional attachments, have hobbies, and make decisions that are not pre-mandated by their programming.

According to OneShot, robots become tamed over a long period of time when a person treats them as an individual with agency. The key to taming a robot lies in the person’s willingness to believe the robot is an individual despite knowing that the robot has been preprogrammed with specific skills and responsibilities. It is the earnest and consistent demonstration of the robot’s individuality and autonomy on the part of the person that allows the robot to expand its own understanding of its programming. The robot still can not act against the way it has been programmed but neither does its personality and consciousness end at the skeleton of its code.

OneShot strongly implies that the NPCs scattered through the world of the game are tamed by their interactions with the player and Niko and that the World Machine itself has been tamed by the creator of the game and the player even though it acts in opposition to the player. Obviously the NPC’s reactions to the events of the game and the crumbling of their world due to the actions of the World Machine and the player are written into the game’s code but when the player accepts the fictional reality that OneShot offers, the actions of OneShot’s characters take on rich meaning weighty with moral implication.

By constructing the narrative in such a way that suspension of disbelief improves the impact of OneShot’s storytelling tenfold, OneShot demonstrates how our world is deeply layered with realities that we build and shape ourselves. It’s obvious that there is some objective reality to the world we live in, whether that reality is strictly flat material, some incomprehensible cosmic whirlwind, or a vast simulation where every other person exists only in our mind or as a piece of code. But whatever that objective reality is, it is not the world that we actually live in.

The world that we live in is colored by our experiences and by the meaning that we give to things, arbitrary or not. In many cases we can choose to believe things or be taught to believe things that are not objective fact, as with the case of OneShot where the player can stubbornly hold onto the objective fact that OneShot is a work of fiction programmed to present a story in a certain way or they can accept the reality that the game offers in order to create a moving and meaningful experience. Often we can hold multiple contradicting beliefs in our mind at once in the same way that OneShot describes the ability to hold contradicting beliefs in the taming of robots. It is easy to balk at the idea of believing two ideas that contradict one another but as demonstrated by OneShot’s tamed robots, having this ability opens us up to a richer world of experience and allows the world to answer us with broader possibilities.


End file.
